Ed Husain says this about himself: “I am not an American, but I firmly believe that, on balance, American power is a force for good in the world.” Husain is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he wrote these words in an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal today, January 26, 2012 under the title: “Egypt's Revolt and the American Model”. The piece has a subtitle: “The Arab revolutionaries didn't look to China or Russia as examples of good government” which is a quote lifted from the article itself.
What makes this article by this writer at this time a seminal work is that it brings into focus what has been up to now a difficult point on which to focus the debate. The reason has been that the views we always discussed were looked at from the wrong end of the telescope. But lest I mislead you, dear reader, Husain did not turn the telescope around to help us see reality as it is. On the contrary, he exaggerated the distortion to a point where we got the sense that something was absurd. And it was this realization that prepared us to entertain the possibility of another way to look at things. Husain then did something inadvertently by which he made us conclude that looking through the wrong end of the telescope was an idea we ought to reject.
Let us begin at the beginning the way he did, by looking at the right end of the telescope. He starts the article like this: “Upon landing at Cairo … I see a billboard that quotes … Obama ... Across Egypt I find … books on how to pass entrance tests for American universities. It's a jarring contrast, then, to return to JFK airport and see … the fashionable tendency … to talk down American standing in the Middle East.” So far so good, at least as far as his effort goes to introduce us to empirical observations he made during the voyage. But where he goes wrong is when he neglects to look at the details of what he just observed, a stance he takes in favor of doing something else. What he does is look at a mirror in which he sees himself behind the telescope looking at the mirror. Here is this part: “Granted, it is necessary to analyze America's influence .. but … another matter to ... campaign for a less powerful America...”
This is where you realize that Ed Husain got caught in the same circular debate that will end up making his argument look like a dog chasing its tail. In fact, he goes on to rehash the worn out arguments that were formulated by the Jewish leaders and articulated by the neocons. To this end, he quotes Tony Blair who exalted America by comparison to Russia and China. And he chides what he calls American conventional wisdom concerning the weakening of American leverage in the Middle East which he says will become a self-fulfilling prophecy unless the US government stops leading from behind and finds its backbone.
And surprise, surprise, he finds the spot in the article where he can insert the obligatory bashing of Egypt's military. He does so and then relates an incident during which he stood up not to that military but to the American Embassy in Cairo that did not swagger in its face when it should have. It all happened via Twitter, he says, and his contribution as a British born citizen of Bangladeshi descent now living in America, was to challenge the American Embassy with the tweeted question: “Then what?” which presumably meant: And what are you going to do about it, suckers?
Lacking confidence in themselves, Embassy officials asked him what should be done, he says, and he replied that the US government should ask its military allies to return to their barracks, or else there is that small matter of 1.3 billion dollars annually. To bolster his argument, he quotes Joseph Nye of Harvard who defined soft power. But then Husain does something that ends up halting the dog from chasing its tail, at least for a short while. He begins by saying that the US government must believe in itself and project confidence. Okay, you say, this goes with what the Jewish leaders have BS(ed) about for ages, and what he himself has been saying up to now in the article. And then, he begins the process of tripping himself, an act that will eventually stop the circular argument in its tracks. This is what he writes in this regard: “[the US government must] realize that America remains hugely attractive across the Middle East.”
Is he going to trip himself now? He will but not yet. For a while longer, he resists making the next logical step which would have been to free himself of the circular argument and to start looking at the reality that the telescope could be showing him. Instead of doing this, he forces himself once again to take up the Tony Blair comparison of America versus China or Russia, and thus returns to the habit of looking at himself in the mirror once again. And he uses this situation as a springboard to assert that the American system of government is so perfect, even the Islamist love it while the rest of the population loves Hollywood films, McDonald's, Starbucks, jeans, baseball caps, Facebook and Twitter. That must be it; the trip wire that will unravel the whole phony argument. Are we there yet?
Yes. Finally, he did what he should to have done at the start instead of going through the verbal trash he inflicted on us. Here is what he said in this regard: “...this generation of Arabs won't recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Trying to force them to do so will not only fail but risks compromising American influence. It is wiser to … help Palestinians realize their dream of a dignified, free state.” Had he started with this and had he coupled it with the reality that the Arabs have no animosity toward the Americans, he would have dispelled the decades worth of Jewish propaganda which “educated” the American public and political classes to the stupid notion that the Arabs hate America because the first hate freedom and the latter loves it.
Husain would have shown that the half-century's worth of one-sided Jewish talk on the Middle East absent of an Arab push back must now be flushed down the toilet where it belongs. Instead of that, he realized that he came close to committing a sacrilegious act, and quickly did something to appease the Jewish leaders who will be reading the article. He saluted Anatoli Sharansky whom, he says, predicted the rise of democratic forces in the Arab countries. Good he stopped short of saying that Sharansky, the Russian-Israeli Jew, caused the Arab Revolution and led it to a triumphant resolution like only a Jew could do it.
And he ends the article with this: “As Egypt and other Arab nations experiment with democracy, the U.S. cannot be seen to be weak, nor craving for yesteryear, but instead must support the people's cries of freedom.”
The poor thing, he still does not realize that the Arabs understand freedom and know how to go about obtaining it if and when it slips through their fingers. It is not they who cry in vain for freedom, wondering how to reclaim their country and their culture; it is the people who live under Jewish tyranny in the English speaking world. Maybe Ed Husain will someday prove that he understands this message by writing honestly of what he knows without having to appease his Jewish masters.